Disability rights

How well do we support those with mental illness?

An estimated 137,000 Oregonians suffer from serious mental illness and nearly 39,000 children live with serious mental health conditions. How well do we support these individuals and their families?

Oregon's public mental health system provides services to only 43 percent of adults who live with serious mental illnesses, spending only $117 per capita or 2.1 percent of total state spending. With the legislature struggling with budget cuts, how will mental health services fare?

What if the labor movement never happened? What if we never gained weekends or sick leave? Or lunch hours, paid vacation, health insurance? The 40-hour work week? With hundreds of union-busting bills pending across the nation, Abe and Joe return to the ongoing assault on workers.

Abe and Joe survey the outbreak of union-busting legislation in the U.S.

What if the labor movement never happened? What if we never gained weekends or sick leave? Or lunch hours, paid vacation, health insurance? The 40-hour work week? With hundreds of union-busting bills pending across the nation, Abe and Joe return to the ongoing assault on workers.

Oregon lawmakers are considering several bills aimed at sex-trafficking, including tougher sentences and fines, publicizing names of johns, and detention of child prostitutes. This week, Jo Ann and Dave took a look at these bills and at other strategies for stopping sexual exploitation of Oregon youth.

Kevin Mannix promised voters in 1994 that his Ballot Measure 11 establishing minimum mandatory sentences would create certainty in Oregon's criminal justice system. While the measure tripled the state's prison population over 20 years, a new report by the state Criminal Justice Commission finds that Measure 11 not only failed to deliver certainty, it has cost the state billions of dollars while it shifting sentencing power from the hands of judges to those of district attorneys - a shift many see as dangerous.